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The time has flown by and we are focused once again on seeing whether the British pound can do a good job of maintaining its exchange rates against other currencies, or whether it will struggle to keep its nose in front. Let’s see how things turned out.

An overview of the currency markets for July 16th – July 20th 2012

The opening rate for the pound against the US dollar this week was 1.5473. The week started well as the pound rose to 1.5523 to close out Monday. But this would not turn out to be the best rate of the week. Apart from a lull midweek, the pound was able to carry on improving and reach a closing rate of 1.5674 by the time the week was over. It was a good start, to be sure.

Could we repeat this feat against the Euro though? We started with a rate of 1.2698 here, and once again Monday kicked off the week in good fashion as we climbed to 1.2748. We fell back a little the following day but once that slight backward step was out of the way it was all systems go to climb against the Euro for the remainder of the week. Indeed the final exchange rate that week turned out to be 1.2847, which was much better than we had perhaps hoped for.

Let’s see whether a similar pattern could be created against other currencies as well – the Hong Kong dollar for example. Here we began on a rate of 12.002 and once again the pattern was very similar. One difference was that the slight slip backwards occurred on Wednesday, but there was still enough time to improve on our exchange rate by the time the week was over. Here we managed to climb to 12.158 against the Hong Kong dollar.

Next up we should check the state of play against the New Zealand dollar. The opening rate here was 1.9559 but the progress made through the week was far more hesitant in this case. Monday’s progress was downhill so we were already on the back foot. By the time Friday arrived we had made progress overall, but only enough to get us to 1.9576 as the markets closed.

Finally let’s see if we managed to create a similar pattern against the Australian dollar. We began on a healthy 1.5217 here but this was the one currency the pound was destined to suffer against this week. The pound fell steadily to a level of 1.5038 on Thursday, before perking up a little to close on 1.5081 on Friday.

Notable events in the world of currency

A slight improvement against the Canadian dollar

There was good news here as the pound rose from 1.5734 to 1.5832 against the Canadian dollar.

More good news against the Swiss franc

Here the pound started on a rate of 1.5249 and climbed to an impressive 1.5428 by the end of the week.

Good news against the Chinese currency too

It wasn’t a bad week for the pound, as it rose from 9.885 to 9.992 against the Chinese yuan too.

The Euro came to the fore of the news stories again last week, and it became clear that other independent European currencies were holding strong against the single currency. This story on the Bloomberg website illustrated how well the Swedish krona was doing as a result of the debt crisis still raging in Europe.

So it has been a good week for the British pound and we can only hope it continues. We’ve had reasonable weeks before but this was particularly promising given the pound did well against the vast majority of major currencies. We shall see whether or not this continues into a fresh week, but for now at least the news is good. Unless things change drastically perhaps we can look forward to more good news next week as well, even if we don’t see as many improvements as we did this week. We shall be back to reveal the latest movements made by the pound then.